1. Field
The present invention lies in the field of data mining and in particular relates to the handling of graph database queries.
2. Description of the Related Art
Performance bottle necks in distributed computing environments include communication network bandwidth and processing capability. When distributing query evaluation of queries such as SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) queries, a significant increase of network traffic is caused by intermediate results being fetched and forwarded to processing servers for joint operation. In complicated query patterns (with multiple joint variables), this can lead to a large number of data being transferred between devices, many of which will not be included in the final query results, and thus represent unnecessary network traffic. Furthermore, processing bottlenecks can be caused by requiring particular processing servers to perform a series of search operations on a large search space.